The AstroStat Slog

Almost 100 years ago, A.S. Eddington stated in his book Stellar Movements (1914) that

…in calculating the mean error of a series of observations it is preferable to use the simple mean residual irrespective of sign rather than the mean square residual

Such eminent astronomer said already least absolute deviation over chi-square, if I match simple mean residual and mean square residual to relevant methodologies, in order. Continue reading ‘a century ago’ »

What if R. A. Fisher was hired by the Royal Observatory in spite that his interest was biology and agriculture, or W. S. Gosset^[1] instead of brewery? An article by E.L. Lehmann made me think this what if. If so, astronomers could have handled errors better than now. Continue reading ‘On the history and use of some standard statistical models’ »

1. Gosset’s pen name was Student, from which the name, Student-t in t-distribution or t-test was spawned.[↩]